Paint Schoodic

Join us on the American Eagle in June or in Acadia National Park in August. Click here for more information.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Romanticizing the familiar

Niagara, 1857, by Frederic
Edwin Church

Yesterday, I talked about the differences between what is
actually present in a landscape and what an artist paints. This morning I
thought I’d look at a subject I know intimately: Niagara Falls.

Distant View of Niagara Falls, 1830, Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole, the patriarch of the Hudson River
School, was interested in celebrating the untamed American wilderness. In Distant View of Niagara Falls, he presses the forest up against the cataracts. Two noble savages
observe the view; other figures are distantly present on the Canadian shore.

Although this picture
was taken in 1858, it probably better represents what Niagara Falls looked like
in 1830 than Cole’s painting does. It's exactly contemporary with Church's Niagara.

By 1830, Niagara Falls had been host to white settlement and
exploration for almost two centuries. The cataracts themselves were surrounded by factories,
thriving towns, and the hotels, shops and other businesses serving the tourist
trade. A band of Tuscarora lived in a village on Goat Island (that bit between
the cataracts), selling
their handicrafts to tourists.

Niagara Falls, from the American Side, 1867, by Frederic Edwin Church. This view is so
accurate to reality that it is no surprise to learn that he had a sepia photograph to use as reference.

In editing the real into the sublime, Cole made the forests
and the sky his primary subject. He sets the viewer so far back from the Falls that
the grandeur of the scene lies in its setting, not in the cataracts themselves.

Frederic Church’s most well-known canvas of Niagara takes an
entirely different approach: he strips out the inconsequential, focusing on the
rim of water. This corresponds so exactly to our psychological reaction that we
locals think it’s triggering memory. In fact, a hundred thousand viewers
flocked to see it in the first two weeks of its debut; most of them had probably
never visited Niagara, but they all felt the roar of the Falls. From a strictly
visual standpoint, however, it doesn’t reflect reality any more than Cole’s
painting did, because Goat Island is much closer than he represented it to be.

The view (approximately) which Church painted in 1857.

Both Cole and Church sought to eliminate man's touch on the landscape; both succeeded. Niagara Falls has been painted so many times, by so many first-rate
artists, and they almost all share that goal. Here is Bierstadt’s painting,
and here is William
Morris Hunt’s.

Let me know if
you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any
time. Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!